Author: Irvine Welsh
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This is the very first Irvine Welsh I've ever read, and rest assured that it's also the very last. The story focuses on Lucy Brennan who is a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer who hates women, hates overweight people, hates down-on-their-luck people, well, pretty much hates everyone she feels is lower on the social ladder than Lucy is herself which means, well, she hates everyone.
So naturally she has some upside, to make us - if not identify with the main character, at least be interested in what she has to say and where she's going, right? Well, er, no. There's absolutely nothing whatsoever to like, to love, to admire, to envy, nor is there anything to suggest that we can learn something from this character. She's horrible, relentlessly horrible, hatefully horrible. She's self-centered, blindly arrogant, superior, and thinks the world ought to be brushing its collective teeth with whatever she excretes from her spite-ridden ass.
I detested her pretty much from the off, and detested her more with each passing chapter until I reached a point where I couldn't stand to read another screen of this novel.
I'd foolishly thought this story might actually be about the sex lives of Siamese twins - a story which would have been fascinating and fun, but the Siamese twins are nothing but a background news story used as a really amateur and ham-fisted metaphor for the relationship of Lucy with an overweight - sorry, I mean fat (because in Lucy's world that's all there is: you're either a gorgeous babe or you're a fat, worthless bitch) - woman she encounters by the name of Lena Sorensen.
It's painfully obvious from the start that these two will hook up (Lucy is bi), so there is no mystery here, nor is there anything to look forward to. All we have is page after page of Pushy-Lucy, judgmental (if not simply mental) as hell, and promoting herself to maximize the fifteen minutes of fame she stumbles into as the novel begins.
Well this novel had its fifteen minutes and now it's toothpaste - or at least it would be in Lucy's opinion!
